I haven't dealt with software licensing in a long time, and I was honestly surprised by the AI's position that if an MIT-licensed project adds an MIT-licensed module that uses a single GPL-3 component, the entire resulting binary has to be distributed under GPL-3.
The AI is probably right, but this kind of "cannibalism" on the GPL side is surprising, especially considering the relative amount of work involved. The main software is MIT, the module is MIT, there's some small piece of GPL-3 code somewhere in the mix, and suddenly the whole binary has to be GPL-3.
At the same time, it's not at all clear why the binary itself needs to be GPL-3, but that already feels like a red flag for using such components in commercial projects.
That naturally raises the question: why not get around these restrictions by asking an AI to rewrite that GPL-covered fragment from scratch? The problem is that it will most likely just produce essentially the same GPL-covered code again.
The AI is probably right, but this kind of "cannibalism" on the GPL side is surprising, especially considering the relative amount of work involved. The main software is MIT, the module is MIT, there's some small piece of GPL-3 code somewhere in the mix, and suddenly the whole binary has to be GPL-3.
At the same time, it's not at all clear why the binary itself needs to be GPL-3, but that already feels like a red flag for using such components in commercial projects.
That naturally raises the question: why not get around these restrictions by asking an AI to rewrite that GPL-covered fragment from scratch? The problem is that it will most likely just produce essentially the same GPL-covered code again.
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